Social Media

Well, this is more about the rules around social media than the actual thing itself . . . if “thing” is the right word. Can you call social media a thing if it’s not tangible? Semantics, word issues, ok, moving on . . .

So, I wanted to write something on this because it’s been occurring to me lately when I’ve been interacting with friends or, rather, in most cases “friends” who are not really actual friends on Facebook or Twitter. Well, ok, Twitter is a different thing really because the barriers are looser and there is no actual “friending” going on, it’s just basically a big free-for-all. So, I guess I’m really just talking about Facebook.

If you’re on Facebook you’ll know that there are basic online safety things that the guys who run the site make you subscribe to; things like not friending people you don’t know (although most people do that anyway on a minor scale, but if it gets out of hand and people start reporting you for sending out friend requests for no apparent reason then they send you semi-threatening messages to say please don’t do it any more). There are also rules about posting offensive content, although I’m not sure about the stringency of these rules either since things still seem to get posted anyway. But still, by and large, there are rules of sorts.

But, if you are on Facebook, you might also be aware that, among your “friends”, there are a number of unspoken/unwritten rules that rely, basically, on common sense and common courtesy. Nobody tells you these rules, they don’t come from Facebook as requirements of usage, and your friends don’t make you aware of them in any overt sense. But they are there.

These are some of the things I think are pretty obviously in need of rules, spoken or otherwise:

1. Commenting on pictures of other people’s children. Ok, so if you know the person in real life, or have actually met the child themselves, then this is acceptable. But, if you’ve never met any of the people in the picture, and particularly if it’s a personal picture from someone whom you’re only friends with in a work or acquaintance sort of a way; if it’s a picture of someone’s kid playing with another family member or something, then that’s not appropriate, is it? I think that one’s probably most obvious of all because we’re all, obviously, hyper-aware of the vulnerability of kids on the internet and for a complete stranger to comment on your kid’s picture, even, or perhaps especially if it’s to say something complimentary, that’s just going to freak people out. Right? So there are judgments to make there about what is acceptable – maybe liking the picture is acceptable if you’ve established a rapport with the person, but that also might be pushing it a bit.

2. Commenting on extremely personal posts. Again this is down to if you know the person and it really relies on a judgment call because if they’re commenting on their personal lives, or making statements about their relationships then a) it’s not right for people to comment if they know nothing about it and b) it’s very awkward if they do and the other person doesn’t appreciate it. I mean you could say that Facebook is not the right place to put such personal stuff anyway and, to be honest, most of the people I know don’t do that, but when they do it’s tough to know what to say and often the best thing is just to ignore it and move on.

3. Business talk. I have a mix of friends on my Facebook page. Most are to do with work or professional interest; you know, writers, publishers, people with academic or literary backgrounds mostly. But I have other friends on there too; people I’ve known from school or college, or just people I used to hang around with who I like to keep up with every now and again. Now, mostly when I put things on Facebook about what I’m reading, I will get responses from the former group, the professionals and the academics, some of whom agree with me and some of whom just want to argue with my taste or opinions. Every now and again though, I have comments on these things from other friends, some of whom do not read the same kind of things as me or take nearly the same level of interest and, often these comments will show a lack of understanding or just general boredom at me putting that kind of status out there.

What this proves, I suppose, is that work and personal life don’t really mix. And it works vice versa, of course, because the work people don’t necessarily want to read/join in with the nonsense me and my friends spout on Facebook when we’re just trying to relax and unwind at the weekend. True there’s a bit of leeway there, of course, because a lot of people use Facebook to relax at the weekends and many people choose to mess around on there, but there is still a huge grey area surrounding how much of the personal you really want if your page is, primarily, being used to gain and maintain professional contacts. Maybe it’s just because social media isn’t really intended for that purpose, that’s probably what makes it so tricky, but if you try to separate it out completely and use one of the business networking sites for all the work stuff then that just becomes impossible because you don’t want to be moving from site to site all the time, do you?

4. Offensive content. Obviously, I’ve already mentioned there are bans on offensive content and you can be reported for putting that up on Facebook, but there are more minor things that need to be thought about beyond that. Again, judgment call: how much do you want your friends to see you swearing or being tagged in less than flattering pictures? This is an image thing, I guess, you don’t want people to get the wrong impression of you and you don’t want to offend other people just by letting off steam in a Facebook status, so you have to be careful here. I myself don’t swear much in my Facebook posts unless it’s just a really necessary part of what I’m saying, and even then I’ll usually asterisk out several characters (although, I don’t really know what this achieves as it’s still really obvious what the word is . . . anyway it’s a gesture, let’s people know I don’t really want to offend them . . . I hope.)

I also get really angry when people tag me in unflattering photos without asking me first – although it’s only happened once or twice, it’s left me seriously considering unfriending the people who did it, because, you know, everybody else can see it, and I might not want that! So there’s a courtesy issue, as well, you have to be aware at all times that what you put online can be seen by everyone else and will have an impact on other people – they’ll react to it and not always in a good way.

5. Politics. This might not be such a massive issue, but there’s only so much political stuff that even the most avid follower of current events will want to put on their page; people don’t really like to have other people’s views shoved in their faces, although it is nice sometimes to know that they’ve got some. I don’t put much to do with politics on my own page because I’m not that bothered about it really, but if other people do then I’ll sometimes comment. Most of my friends are Labour supporters or just liberals of some vague descriptions. I don’t think I’ve got any Conservative friends (or, if I do, they haven’t admitted as much to me). That’s one thing that does seem to be ok across the board of social media: mockery of David Cameron is acceptable no matter what your interest in politics. It’s almost on the same level as Thatcher-bashing now and it’s quite funny too, if I’m honest. But that’s as far as it goes really, you don’t want to turn your social media time into a big political forum and debate the problems of the nation; I mean, it’s still supposed to be fun for God’s sake!

6. Moaning too much about your day-to-day hassles. This is something a lot of people do. I’ve got friends who use Facebook, principally, so that they can update everybody on all the household chores and different meals they’ve had to deal with during the day. One of my friends puts these things up in a great long continuous stream on her statuses – no punctuation of any kind, just a great long string of a sentence: “cleaned the house hoovered the carpets bathed the baby ate breakfast then off to the shops”. I mean, I’m not criticizing her or anything really, but this is every day that we get these updates, and what are we supposed to say? “Yeah you have a really hard life, we all feel so sorry for you?” . . . She’s not going to be reading this by the way, just in case anyone’s wondering.

But then, she’s not even the worst one, I’ve got other friends who do this as well, tell me and all their other friends about the horrors they have to deal with when their shower breaks or they get a cold and still have to go to work. I mean I know everybody needs to moan about things every now and again, but is Facebook really the place to do it? Surely they’ve got real people to talk to about these things, there’s no need to bother the rest of the world with it is there? What bothers me, personally, is that when they do this they actually expect a response, as if we’re all going to be fascinated by this stuff. Anyway . . .

That’s all I can think of right now, but it seemed to me that there are a lot of things about the internet that we’re still kind of feeling our way around because, as yet, the kinds of rules and etiquettes that we would have in the course of normal social interaction have yet to be defined online. It’s obviously something that’s being looked at right now, because there are so many concerns about the inappropriate content and the amount of unsavoury things you can find on social media and online search sites. The UK government has recently been talking about revising the laws for online media and I think there are far more concerns about it in the US, but the truth is there are probably always going to be concerns about the smaller issues of privacy and security online and things like common courtesy and good judgment will always be necessary tools for the modern internet user. I suppose what I’m saying is that we now have to think far more consciously about the fact that, just because we’re online, doesn’t mean we have the right to invade or comment on all aspects of other people’s lives. If you saw that person in the street, someone you didn’t actually know in real life I mean, then you wouldn’t just go up to them and start commenting critically on their outfit or telling them all about what you had for breakfast would you? You wouldn’t say things about their kids or try to take pictures of them so you could “tag” them and make some kind of personal connection with them that way. Because that would be inappropriate and wrong.

The rules around social media should be no different to rules present in society. But if you can’t see people then things change, apparently . . . It’s a grey area. Be aware.